The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [70]
French reformers tried to counter these folkloric notions with a wide-ranging public education campaign. Booklets on hygiene, public health columns in the newspapers and hygiene classes in the schools were pitched at levels that excluded almost no one. In his Encyclopédie de la santé, cours d’hygiène populaire, published in 1855, J. Massé describes a bath in painstaking detail, taking nothing for granted, beginning with the equipment—a small tub, a dish half—full of cold water, a kettle of hot water, a large piece of flannel and two large sponges of the kind used to clean floors (but no soap). First the bather rubs his body all over with the cloth. Then, dipping his two sponges into water, one in each hand, he begins the work of washing. “Do not leave off for a moment,” he is instructed, “use your water in such a way that you have enough to operate for at least one minute; and as soon as you have finished, step out of the tub and quickly take a towel to dry yourself.”
THE MINER’S WIFE WASHES HER HUSBAND
“She had gone down from his back to his buttocks and, warming up to the job, she pushed ahead into the cracks and did not leave a single part of his body untouched, making it shine like her three saucepans on spring-cleaning Sundays… The bath always ended up like this—she made him excited by rubbing so hard and then towelling him everywhere, tickling the hairs on his arms and chest. It was the time when all the chaps in the village took their fun and more children were planted than anyone wanted.”
—Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885
Hygiene in the school curriculum, launched in 1882 by Jules Ferry, the minister of education, began with the youngest children and proceeded through the grades. Personal hygiene infiltrated the whole curriculum, appearing not just in health and science classes, but also in dictations, assigned readings and recitations. A dictation for children in the early grades reads, “Louise does not like cold water. This morning she thought she had washed herself because she gently passed the flannel across the end of her nose. Her face stayed dirty and her hands black. Her mother does not want to kiss her in that state.”
Another dictation, about a studious but dirty little boy, continues with questions: “Why do people not like this little boy? … Does he look after his hair?” The lesson concludes, “Conjugate: I know my duty. I wash my hands. I wipe and polish the brasswork.”
But the cleanliness preached in the schools focused on the visible, especially hands and face. No one expected the textbooks to mention the anal or genital areas, but almost the only part of the body other than hands and head that was recommended for washing was the feet. Even a minimal schedule of washing was honoured more in the breach than in the observance in French boarding schools. Bathing once a month in the winter, as ordered by the committees on hygiene, was rarely possible in large parts of the country. In a late-nineteenth-century survey of lycées throughout France, fewer than half had bathing accommodations for boarding students, and infrequent visits to the municipal bathhouse were considered sufficient. In some schools, only students who were ill took full baths.
Public bathhouses, which began so haltingly in nineteenth-century France, won a slow, partial approval.